Warranty work: In the late 90's I was repairing a beige desktop Mac (early PPC), I needed to remove the logic board, and while attempting to pry up the logic board I slipped with the screwdriver, which ripped off a resistor in the process. As it was warranty work on behalf of the manufacturer (I was working for a service agent), all parties agreed it was a mistake that could have happened to any technician, so it continued to be covered.

Destroyed keyboard: I once spilt a Fanta on a white Apple keyboard, the clear plastic base with the full height keys, the last of it's kind before the current flat aluminium keyboards cam in.

Almost lost data: I was click happy once during the process of backing up a laptop for a staff member (planning to upgrade the OS), and instead if hitting backup, I hit erase. I was able to restore the data thanks to hard drive erasing only modifying the first block or two on the disk, instead of going to the time and trouble of erasing the entire disk.

>"DOS attacks can be a pre-cursor for a far more malicious exploit. Lose the ignorance, think Sony"

What ignorance ? I have been the target of a DoS attack in the past, so don't assume any ignorance on my part. As for the subject in hand, I agree with Synerg1y's last comment... "Still, I have a feeling this whole situation is going to make the internet a much less free place, start reading on SSL tunnels & off-shore server hosting?"

bad example, at a rally, people are there to hear those on stage, same deal with a website, being drowned out, does not stop the visibility, even for those on stage, a DoS attack stops even the visibility. But in the end that still doesn't change the fact that the DoS attack is a form of censorship.

FYI, a DDOS attack is just a type of DoS attack, as they are acronym's, lets break them down... DDOS - Distributed Denial of Service, DoS - Denial of Service, the word distributed is just a reference to how a DoS attack is performed. There is no point in continuing to describing them as DDOS attacks when most DoS attacks are distributed attacks these days anyway.

>"Only if you consider governments to be people. There is a fundamental difference between privacy in official governmental capacity or (to a limited extent) by a public figure and the privacy of an individual person."

But, a government, any government, is still made up of individual people.

I also have a comment for the group Anonymous, DoS attacks are the opposite of free speech, as it denies free speech from the person/group receiving the attack. So all I am seeing with Anonymous' DoS attacks is support for the very thing they claim to be attacking. Free speech is one thing where being the example to show why something is bad, is actually only working against Anonymous because their DoS attacks are actually showing why censorship is good.

If that were really true, the iTunes Plus format would not exist, and none of their devices would be able to play mp3's... (like Sony tried to do with their ATRAC format until they finally realised on one was buying).